JIANLI, China - Rescuers searched a sunken cruise ship in the Yangtze River on Wednesday for more than 400 missing people, many of them elderly, but hopes of finding more survivors were fading in what could be China’s worst shipping disaster in almost 70 years.
State television showed rescuers, some standing gingerly on the upturned hull of the Eastern Star, and scores of divers working through the night.
Only 14 people, including the ship’s captain, have been found alive since the ship capsized in a freak tornado on Monday night with 456 people on board. Just 26 bodies have been recovered.
The relatives of dozens of the ship’s passengers from the cities of Nanjing and Suzhou urged the government to allow them to gather at the river to watch the rescue operation, according to a statement from 47 family members.
They asked the government to release the names of the living and the dead to them on site, the statement said.
In a separate statement, the relatives said they had “several doubts” about the incident and questions such as why most of the people rescued were crew members, why the boat did not dock, and why the captain and crew members had time to don their life vests but not sound any alarm.
Rescuers have not slackened off, even though about 200 divers face difficulties such as cabin doors blocked by tables and beds. There is also the fear that rashly cutting holes in the hull could burst air pockets keeping people alive.
“Although there’s lots of work to do, saving people is still being put first,” Transport Ministry spokesman Xu Chengguang told reporters.
State television showed a rain-soaked Premier Li Keqiang, who is on the scene overseeing rescue efforts, bowing in respect to two bodies laid out on the deck of a boat covered in sheets.
“Life is greater than the heavens, and the burden on your shoulders is massive,” Li told a group of military divers, the government said in a statement.
But some relatives were already bracing themselves for the worst.
“Yesterday I still had some hope. The boat is big and the water hadn’t gone all the way in. Now, it’s been more that 40 hours. I ask you, what do I have left?” said Wang Feng, a 35-year-old wedding photographer whose father was on the ship.
The ship was on an 11-day voyage upstream from the city of Nanjing, near Shanghai, to Chongqing.
While the People’s Daily said the ship passed inspections by authorities in Chongqing last month, in 2013 it was investigated and held by authorities due to defects, according to documents from a local maritime watchdog.
The Nanjing Maritime Safety Administration investigated Eastern Star as part of a safety campaign into passenger ferries and tour boats and held the ship along with five other vessels, according to three documents on the bureau’s website.
The documents did not give details on the nature of the defects but said the issues were reported to the Chongqing maritime safety bureau.
The search area has been expanded up to 220 km (135 miles) downstream, state television said, suggesting that bodies could have been swept far away from where the ship foundered in the rain-swollen river.
Three bodies were found 50 km (30 miles) away near Yueyang city in neighbouring Hunan province, state media said.
Zou Luwang, who lives in a village near the river, said the government called residents to warn of extreme weather on the night the ship capsized. “I believe those who operate the boats have expertise about this, but the weather was unusually bad for these parts,” he told Reuters.
Zhang Hui, a tour guide who survived the disaster, told the official Xinhua news agency that it was raining so hard, water was seeping through cabin windows, and that the ship then listed violently.
“I thought, ‘this isn’t right’, and I told my colleague, ‘I think we’re in trouble’. After I said that, the ship flipped over. It only took 30 seconds or a minute,” Zhang said.
Li Yongjun, captain of a freighter that passed near the Eastern Star shortly before it capsized, told Xinhua the weather was so bad he decided to anchor and wait out the storm.
He said he heard a voice from the river crying, “Help!” just after 10 p.m. (1600 GMT), about 30 minutes after state media has said the Eastern Star capsized. “The rain was just too heavy, there was no way to mount a rescue, so I shouted over, ‘swim to the bank!’,” Li said.
The captain and chief engineer have been detained by police for questioning. An initial investigation found the ship was not overloaded and had enough life vests on board.
The ship overturned “within one or two minutes”, Xinhua quoted the captain as saying. He was dragged out of the water near a pier just before midnight on Monday.
Relatives of the missing, angry at what they perceive as a lack of information, have scuffled with officials in Shanghai. All of the passengers booked their trips through a Shanghai-based travel agency.
China’s weather bureau said a tornado buffeted the area where the ship was cruising, a freak occurrence in a country where twisters can happen but are uncommon.
Accidents of this magnitude are uncommon in China. State media said it was the worst recorded ship disaster on the Yangtze River. In 1948, the steamship Kiangya blew up on the Huangpu river, killing more than 1,000 people.